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Install LibreOffice on Ubuntu and Debian-based Distros

Want to install the new LibreOffice on Ubuntu or a Debian-based distribution? Although the Document Foundation doesn’t yet offer .deb binaries for these distros, you can use the provided .rpm packages to install LibreOffice on a machine running Ubuntu or Debian. To do this, you need to convert .rpm packages to .deb using the alien tool. To install alien on Ubuntu, run the sudo apt-get install alien command. Grab then the latest release of LibreOffice from the project’s Web site, unpack the downloaded .tar.gz archive, rename the resulting directory to libreoffice, and move it into your home directory. Launch the terminal, and switch to the RPMS directory and use alien to convert all .rpm packages in the directory:

cd libreoffice/RPMS/

sudo alien -k *.rpm

Install then the resulting .deb packages using the following command:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

This installs the productivity suite, but it doesn’t provide any desktop integration. Fortunately, this problem is easy to fix. Switch to the desktop-integration directory and convert the libreoffice3.3-freedesktop-menus-3.3-9526.noarch.rpm package:

cd desktop-integration/

alien -k libreoffice3.3-freedesktop-menus-3.3-9526.noarch.rpm

Install then the converted package using the sudo dpkg -i libreoffice3.3-freedesktop-menus_3.3-9526_all.deb command. This adds LibreOffice menu entries to the Applications | Office menu and integrates LibreOffice with your desktop.

@ulrik
LibreOffice is tagged as beta and on the website they stress that it should not be used in a production environment. And you are correct when you state “Good way to get into trouble.”
It’s just for testing.

On the contrary, I don’t think it will take much at all to compete with OpenOffice.org.

The fact of the matter is people like free source, and Oracle has ruined that. They haven’t done a thing with their newly acquired office suite.

In addition there are many patches which have been contributed which neither Sun nor Oracle has added into the main repo, while LibreOffice.org has. So off the bat they’re competing.

And let’s not also forget the fact that many of the major contributors to OpenOffice.org have moved from OOo to LibreOffice. It’s looking like a shutdown effect for Oracle’s OOo- Ubuntu has already pledged support for LibreOffice over OOo.